Don't Tell Victoire About "A Woman's Place"

Note: This blog post is not intended to be a complete commentary on this subject. Those who have been to the Monocacy National Battlefield may read this and ask,"But what about the slavery at that plantation?" That's not a subject to which I can do justice in a single paragraph on this blog posts; it deserves a more complete commentary in separate blog posts devoted to that subject.

Dear Friends,

The Best Farm, formerly known as L'Hermitage

I'd really like to know what kind of education Victoire Vincendiere had that prepared her for the kind of life she lived. This is a woman who seems to have spent her life defying convention, and she was very successful at it. 

The National Park Service's records indicate that Victoire was born in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) in 1776. Much of her early life is unknown, but we do know that in 1795 she purchased from Daniel Dulaney 457 acres, and in 1798 she purchased another 291 acres from James Marshall.¹ This would become the home the family referred to as L'Hermitage.

Did you catch that? Victoire -- not her father or her older brother or a male "family friend" -- purchased both tracts of land. In fact, her father decided to set up his own household down in Charleston, South Carolina, while most of the rest of the family decided to stay with Victoire just outside Frederick, Maryland. If the 1776 birth year is correct, she would have been 19 years old when she purchased that first tract of land.

It's on the acreage she purchased from Marshall that she and her family built the manor house and associated outbuildings. Since she purchased that tract in 1798, and was hit with a massive tax assessment that same year for improvements, there is speculation that she may have had an agreement with Marshall that allowed her to begin building before the sale was made official.²

Just two years later in the 1800 census, Victoire is living in a household with 18 free whites and 90 slaves.³ We can speculate all day long why she had so many slaves, and we can debate how much credibility we should lend to data in a census while we work to track down more data, but it's clear that Victoire wasn't interested in running just a small family farm. She really embraced the philosophy "Go big or go home."

She doesn't seem to have been operating on a shoestring budget, either. In 1803, when James Marshall passed away, she had sufficient funds to join with Norm Bruce to lend William and Eleanor Marshall the 10,000 pounds they needed for the administrators bond to execute the will.⁴

Victoire wouldn't ultimately sell L'Hermitage until 1827, but several years earlier in 1820 she ran a newspaper advertisement that listed many of the buildings on the property⁵:

A HANDSOME FARM,
FOR SALE.
THE subscriber offers for sale, her FARM, containing 500 ACRES OF PRIME LAND, the greatest part of which has been improved by clover and plaster.  This Farm is beautifully situated on Monocacy River, three miles from Fredericktown, (Md.) on the George-town road, 38 miles from the latter city, and 10 from Potomac; about 60 acres of it are in fine tim[b]er.
   THE improvements are -- a good two story STONE HOUSE with six rooms and a Cellar; a stone barn; stone stable, large enough for 15 horses; a good two story log dwelling log house; a granary, corn, pigeon, meat log houses; ice house and others; a large well, which, altho' upon a hill, has never less than 20 feet of most excellent lime stone water, even in the driest seasons; a good and well situated garden, of four acres of fruit trees, of several kinds.
   Also, a tract containing 250 Acres of LAND, adjoining the above, and only two miles from Fredericktown, which will be sold with, or seperate [sic] from the first.
   Also, a tract of 37 Acres of Mountain LAND, on the east bank of Monocacy, opposite the above farm. For further information apply to Mr. PETER LAFONT, Baltimore, and the Owner living in said Farm.
                 VICTOIRE VINCENDIERE    april 28 

That sounds almost idyllic. When she did sell the plantation, she sold all 748 acres to John Brien for $24,025.⁶ When she had originally purchased the property back in 1795 and 1798, she had paid 7,023 pounds. Dollars and pounds are not an apples-to-apples comparison, but if we compare that to the value assessment placed on her property for taxes in 1798, we're comparing $24025 in 1827 to $1923 in 1798 for the land only and to $2323 for the land with improvements.² Minimally, she had realized a 10x increase in property value over the 33 years she had managed it, and that doesn't include the revenue she would have seen during her ownership from selling her crops, etc. Not bad for a female immigrant who started as a teenager.

Which practically begs the question: From where did she get this business acumen? I suspect we aren't going to find that her childhood education included classes on how to build and manage a plantation in America. While there is no question that her use and treatment of slaves was wrong, she was using business practices that were accepted during her lifetime. Who was guiding her, at least in the beginning, in these business decisions?

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1 Reed, Paula Stoner, PhD. Monocacy National Battlefield Cultural Resources Study. Interior Department, National Park Service, 1999, p. 58.^↩
2 Ibid, p. 59.^↩
3 United States Federal Census 1800. Frederick, Frederick, Maryland; Series M32, Roll 10, National Archives and Records Administration, pp. 153. ^↩
4 Administrator Bonds Liber Hs No 1-2, 1799-1817. Frederick County, Maryland, Orphans' Court (Frederick County), James Marshall, 15 Jun 1803. Although William Marshall, Eleanor Marshall, Norm Bruce, and Victoire Vincendierre all signed the administrator bond, only the two Marshalls submitted and signed the inventory as executors, so it is likely that Bruce's and Vincendierre's role in administering the will was covering the loan.^↩
5 Vincendierre, Victoire. (1820, June 12) "A Handsome Farm," Baltimore Patriot, p. 1.^↩
6 Reed, Paula Stoner, PhD. Monocacy National Battlefield Cultural Resources Study. Interior Department, National Park Service, 1999, p. 60.^↩